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Tag Archives | Afterlife

Fisker Automotive wants to bring the sexy back to green sport car design.

With Tesla taking a sad and slow turn towards the automotive afterlife, there’s now a gaping hole in the car world for people who want to drive green, but don’t want to drive slow to do so.

Enter: Fisker

The Karma (clever) will be a four-door plug-in hybrid sports sedan, and will start at just $80,000. (I say just because technology like this doesn’t come cheap when you’re trying to debut a whole new type of transportation.)

With initial delivery scheduled for late 2009, and an estimated production run of at least 15,000, there’s definitely some hope of this thing seeing the light of day.

And if it does, what will drivers see?

A sexy exterior wrapped around an even sexier interior powered by a Q DRIVE powertrain. (Q DRIVE is Fisker’s name for their plug-in hybrid technology.) Basically, a small gas engine turns a generator which charges the lithium ion battery pack which then powers the electric motor.

With this configuration, the car can be driven for up to 50 miles per day, as long as the car is then plugged in each night. By following this routine, the car then also only needs one fuel fill-up. Per year.

Will this change the face of green automotive design?

As with the Tesla, only time will tell; though I do hope that this one at least makes it into production, since we’re at going to need baby steps if there’s ever going to be hope of running towards a cleaner type of automobile.